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                                                                                                     Edited  May 1st, 2023

“Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.” THICH NHAT HANH

“The difference between inspired medicine and uninspired medicine is love.” Sarah Ruhl

“I’ve never understood organizing world religions around the concept of guilt rather than around the concept of kindness.” Sarah Ruhl

“Be stone no more … She stirs …   I thought: someday I will melt. Someday I will wake up.” Sarah Ruhl

Today’s post is about a book I’ve been reading, which I heard about on a podcast with Sharon Salzberg and Sarah Ruhl, and also, includes two new drawings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The book I’ll be presenting today with the title smile: a memoir, is by Sarah Ruhl, playwright and writer of other things, as she herself notes, and is dedicated to the many doctors and health practitioners that helped her during a decade of health related upheaval. She writes: “This is a story of how I learned to make my way when my body stopped obeying my heart.” Although the book follows the thread of her journey from childbirth to Bell’s palsy, and finally, to the discovery of undiagnosed autoimmune conditions, it inevitably brings together multiple threads of her life.

She begins chapter three with the sentence “This is a chapter of boredom and entropy”. She writes about her Bed Rest period, the books she read, the bags of books her friends brought her, including many books that featured dead twins and dead mothers. Twins also represent symmetry and the idea of the lost self. She threw them out and wondered about the literary obsession with this topic. She writes about her knitting attempts, the letters she wrote to her young daughter and the yet unborn babies, the feeling of confinement and boredom, and how the idea of bed rest was influenced by John Hilton’s publication of Rest and Pain in 1863. The rest cure became very popular during Victorian times for a myriad conditions, but was finally put to rest when physicians realized that it didn’t help traumatized veterans regain their strength instead it wreaked havoc on them physically and mentally.

In chapter five, a day after giving birth, she introduces the theme of Bell’s palsy, a paralysis of the seventh cranial nerve, which the Greeks called “dog spasm”. Ruhl writes that in contemporary Western medicine there is not a lot you can do to treat Bell’s palsy; doctors generally give some steroids, and then one waits for the nerve to grow back, and often it does. However, there are often underlying causes that if taken into account can increase the chances of recovery. Ruhl writes: “I have since learned that a very attentive doctor at the onset of the illness will automatically prescribe you antivirals (many Bell’s cases are caused by a herpes virus), will also test you for Lyme disease (a large percentage of Bell’s cases…..are caused by Lyme), or treat you for Lyme disease as a precaution. This attentive doctor will also give you a script for physical therapy and tell you to eat plenty of antioxidants. My doctor did none of these things.”

The memoir also speaks of the writer’s religious faith and spiritual journey alongside her health related experiences. Ruhl was raised Catholic and in the book she narrates her doubts as she deals with her own health struggles and the uncertainty concerning her newborns, who begin their life in the NICU. She takes us to her childhood and her current refuge in certain Buddhist teachings, as she navigates this period.

A few short extracts that provide a glimpse into her experience, and also shows how things that happen to us early on, which might not be perceived as highly traumatic influence our lives nonetheless:

“In junior high school, Sister Linda was out sick and we had a substitute teacher for Sunday school named Mr. Ivancovitch. He was very tall, and looked a little how I’d imagine Ichabod Crane, with greasy black hair falling over his face and very thick spectacles. The day he took over Sunday school he decided to focus on the bodily suffering of Jesus. He talked at great length and in great detail about how the lungs would have been affected by being on the cross, how the nails would have ripped through the wrists. It made me afraid……

….. I told Sister Linda that I wasn’t ready to get confirmed. I had expected a rain of judgment from Sister Linda, but what I got was mercy, understanding, and gratitude that I had taken the vow so seriously. She smiled gently, told me I could come back to the church anytime, and let me go home……… The day after I dropped out of confirmation class, a small band of Catholic kids circled me on the playground. “What, do you think, you’re better than us?” ….  “What are you now, Jewish?”………….

It took me two decades before I would read Thomas Merton and feel an affinity with Catholicism again, a faith that could be rescued from childhood tormentors, a faith that could be combined with other belief systems….. But that moment on the porch with the Hanukkah cookies probably shaped whole swaths of my life— the search for an ecumenical faith, the mistrust of institutions, the mistrust of certain kinds of girls…”

Ruhl writes about family, origins, belonging, about her husband, her parents and sister, and about her father who passed away in his fifties from cancer, untreated for celiac disease. We get glimpses of how they loved her and how they influenced her. For instance, she writes: “My father used to allude to what he called my mother’s “quick and darting mind.” My father’s mantra was that we girls must marry our intellectual equals, a mantra I wish more fathers would tell their daughters, and onstage my mother valued her intelligence over her image.” In relation to her mother she writes something that sounds true for daughters across the globe: “It’s hard to know where my mother ends and I begin. Isn’t that the story with so many mothers and daughters? I remember when I was little she taught me what a Venn diagram was. We were on a train, from Chicago to Texas, to see my cousins. In the dining car, on a napkin, my mother carefully drew two circles, showing me the overlapping section. “What do these two circles have in common? Here …” she said, pointing. I was fascinated by the logic of that diagram. Mothers and daughters: two circles, and the all-important bounded sections where they are complete unto themselves. Daughters perhaps have a tendency to point at the differences, mothers to point at the commonalities.”

As I mentioned, the major thread of the story, as the title itself denotes, is Bell’s palsy and all that is connected to that, which is every aspect of her life, the various underlying and undiagnosed health issues and reality. Ruhl begins by explaining that the Duchenne smile is considered the gold standard for a smile and it indicates a smile echoed by the eyes crinkling in response, Duchenne called the muscle that creates movement in the eyes during this smile the “muscle of kindness.” She tells us of her discomfort at being photographed, especially, once her smile became crooked. She writes: “At any rate, my general impatience and discomfort with being photographed pre-Bell’s turned, post-Bell’s, to fear and loathing.” She refers to the societal expectations for women to smile in public. She explores Bell’s palsy through the lens of vanity and asymmetry and wonders about what we do with life,which is asymmetrical and where we put all asymmetrical people with one leg, lazy eyes and crooked smiles….

I pondered how we take for granted many of our automatic responses like smiling. I smile frequently. It is something I don’t often think about. So, it was interesting to follow the unfolding of the smile narrative.  She further wonders about Mona Lisa. Many people have wondered about her smile, too. Was Mona Lisa genuinely happy or sad? What did her smile reflect? Ruhl says that neurologists have observed that her smile is asymmetrical, expressing happiness on one side only and her eyes are not engaged in the smile. Who was she anyway? Was she a self portrait of Leonardo da Vinci or his lover? While I was drawing his portrait [see previous post] while i was looking at portraits of him it was apparent that there were similarities between his facial features and expression and that of Mona Lisa. Did she have a secret? She also writes about her pain at not being able to smile back at her three children and her concerns about the “still face” effect on them during these formative years. She wonders if babies can read the warmth of intention from a thwarted smile and of how to experience joy when you cannot physically express it. She worries that she might traumatize them or stifle their empathy development by not being able to sufficiently mirror them.

Ruhl explores the smile through multiple lenses. Scientists for instance, have found that we show more emotion on the left side, which is controlled by the right hemisphere of the brain, which regulates emotion. She makes reference to the findings of neuroscientists around brain neuroplasticity.  She considers whether we can experience joy when we cannot express joy on our face. She asks: Does the smile itself create the happiness? Or does happiness create the smile? She writes: “This was not only a neurological question, and a Buddhist question, it was also a question for actors…” She explains how in the 1970s Ken Campbell developed an approach to acting using the two sides of the faces separately, which he called the enantiodromic approach. … The theory of enantiodromia is that the left and right sides of your face represent different personalities…  Enantiodromia, according to the ancient Greeks, is a study of how opposites become each other ……  I once bought a two -faced wooden puppet from a gift shop here on the island, which had a smiling expression on one side and a mean expression on the other, a kind of Dr Jekyll and Hyde persona. She explains how portrait painters create life and interest in the face through some kind of asymmetry and through dark and light. The sketches by Rembrandt that I have framed on my wall, souvenirs from a trip of long ago to Holland, with my sister and husband, remind me of this. A student of mine liked to draw faces dramatically split in two, very light on one side and very dark on the other.

She writes about the many health care practitioners she sought help from, the more and less inspiring ones. She tells us of one good doctor, who asked for details, was concerned about her health and her losing weight for no apparent reason, screened her for celiac disease, which is an autoimmune condition and can often go undiagnosed your whole life with dire long term consequences. She writes: “It strikes me that the difference between a good doctor and a less-than-good doctor is one part expertise and three parts quality of listening.” The last diagnosis of Lyme disease, which might have additionally triggered Bell’s palsy, comes from an unexpected source, a retired doctor, who offers his insight after reading about her experience online.

Finally, Ruhl ponders on the overuse of illness as a metaphor because we want to give our illness meaning, like we often want to give our suffering meaning, and says that  if we give our illness too much meaning, we become the agent of our own decline. She quotes Susan Sontag, who has written that “Illness is not a metaphor, and … the most truthful way of regarding illness— and the healthiest way of being ill— is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.” Towards the end of the book Ruhl evaluates her experience of Bell’s palsy and writes: “…that paralysis ended up revealing a potentially life saving diagnosis that affected my whole family…. Maybe Bell’s palsy was a tremendous gift.”

Ultimately, as she engages with living, bringing up children, writing, visiting doctors and trying different healing modalities, she seems to also awaken more to her life and reality. After she watches The Winter’s Tale by Shakespeare she writes:

“I wondered, as I watched The Winter’s Tale: Is Hermione meant to be a real woman or just a metaphor for art? …. ..It is not the husband who wakes the wife, but the woman’s friend…… Be stone no more … She stirs … I thought: someday I will melt. Someday I will wake up.”

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Clear land and construct….

“I imagine myself as a builder constructing houses….. But I reply, the nature of building – of creativity – is to clear land and construct.”  Natalie Goldberg, Thunder and Lightning

“And isn’t it true that our psyches merge and incorporate everyone we encounter anyway?”   Natalie Goldberg

“By cultivating the mental functions of attention, intention, and awareness, we strengthen our ability to identify the source of anxiety and then harness our capacity to promote integration, transforming the energy of threat into the drive towards resilience and equanimity.” Dan J. Siegel, MD

Today’s post is reminiscent of adolescent stories, it includes a few new drawings, a reference to Natalie Goldberg’s book, Thunder and Lightning, which I’ve just finished reading, and also, a link to the most recent episode of the Being Well podcast: https://www.rickhanson.net/being-well-podcast-releasing-obsessive-thoughts-rumination-ocd-and-dealing-with-fear/ , in which Dr Rick and Forrest Hanson discuss the brain’s attempt to problem solve through rumination, the negative effects of too much rumination, some of the reasons we might get stuck in certain thoughts and how we can release obsessive or other anxiety inducing recurring thoughts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Towards the end of the book Natalie Goldberg [writer, painter, writing teacher and Zen practitioner] talks about how we are often silenced very early on through her own stories of school experiences. The book is sort of structured around questions she encourages people to ask themselves as part of the writing practice.  In the epilogue she talks about a week long writing retreat she had created for herself away from home.  In relation to this carving out time to write she says: “…. Out alone on a lonesome cliff hanging onto a craggy rock, your hands bleeding. The same wrestling, openings, surrender, the same scraping against yourself, same humbling, final broken weary acceptance…” During this time she explored the question: Who do you write for? She writes:  “… And yet that evening I reconnected with my one true lineage before all the others: myself. I’d bypassed her, tried to put her to flames when I left home at eighteen….  Now the orphaned one was rising before me. Whom do you write for? I write for you, I answered. To record how you saw and felt before you were silenced. Whom do you write for? I asked again. I write for myself – and through myself I write for everyone…… Remember her. Stay with her. You have uncovered a true root. Stand with her and you’ll be steady on your own feet. You won’t wobble. A veil had been lifted. I’d found a home beyond home.”

Reading the book reminded me of many subtle and more intense moments of being silenced across time. A couple of my own high school experiences inevitably arose. You don’t really forget them, but you put them aside, after all, we are not designed to have all our experiences in the foreground of our mind, we’d be unable to function, we’d collapse, if all our living was constantly salient, vying for our attention. We have also mainly been discouraged from talking about them. Instead we are taught to not make a fuss or toughen up.  I’m resurrecting them here because I think it is essential for everyone to feel safe to talk about these topics.  Talking melts the numbness, the forgetting, it creates a thread of understanding and a seeing of the patterns of our experiences. It is through attention, awareness and conversation that some things can change. Being open about things that have hurt us can awaken others to their own experiences, and to systemic and often systematic unfair or disempowering practices that we may take for granted or resign to.

During the last two years of school our Greek language teacher was married to our Religious Education teacher. They had different personalities, but the same underlying beliefs around, who gets to speak and what is acceptable and who doesn’t, who gets to get an education and who doesn’t. They used the strategy of suffering negative consequences for no reason, or otherwise put, inflicted injustices as a way to discourage and silence. In retrospect, it is easier to see that they were encouraging certain students into pursuing further education while discouraging others. Of course, at the time the broader context which sustained all this was elusive; however, what was available to me were my observations and my emotions.

On one occasion, we were assigned to write about some topic of a socio-economic nature. At the time I was preparing to sit exams for Economic schools, so I found myself looking forward to engaging with the paper. When the teacher finally handed it back to me her commentary was that it was very good, but it could not be mine. An a priori assumption … with no room for further discussion The irony was that she immediately turned to praise the student sitting behind me, who had copied the whole assignment from a book, and whom I had advised to change the wording, in case the teacher had read it or understood that it wasn’t her own voice. …  In class I had felt embarrassed and on the verge of tears. Later at home I was able to get in touch with other feelings like anger and fear, but I pushed it all down so that I could keep returning to classes. We probably all received different lessons that day, but the residue of the embodied emotions is what is still left as an imprint after so many decades.

About the same time, during an RE class, her husband, out of the blue, asked about our opinion on abortions. This was totally out of the ordinary, because these were not the kind of topics discussed in class then, especially, in an RE class with a male teacher. Actually, there usually was not much discussion at all. It was the kind of class where the lesson could put you into deep sleep. He was probably bored himself most of the time and often told jokes that we had to make an effort to find funny. We often did our homework or read other things. As long as we kept quiet we were fine. He’d usually ask one of us to read out aloud the day’s lesson from our school book. We were then expected to learn this by heart and either recite it or answer questions during the next lesson. I had not raised my hand because I didn’t think it was a safe topic to discuss with him, and because I was not sure I even had an informed opinion around the matter at the time. And lo and behold, from all the hands raised in the air [there were about fifty girls in the class] he thought it best to ask me. What could I say? I hesitated and then I replied that it depended on the situation and it probably was a choice that women should make….

His reply came down on me like Damocles’ sword. He casually said “Great, you’ve earned yourself a 14/ 20 grade for the rest of the year”. Nobody got that grade in RE or PE or Art during the last year of school because grades mattered for those sitting university entry exams. No matter what effort I put in or how well I wrote in tests he never raised the grade. Lessons learnt: school is not necessarily a safe place, teachers do not always have our best interest in mind, it’s OK to punish others if we don’t like their views and those older or with authority can be mean and unjust deliberately. Above all, we learnt that it’s not safe to speak our mind.

I will end with an extract from the book, in which Goldberg writes about an old school teacher:

“What is the humming in my brain, the need to talk, this ineffable world I carry inside my physical body that I’m sure communicates out beyond my life and your death, that is held like a dust mote in the air, a swarm of bees, a drifting cloud? Mrs. Post, I’m not angry anymore – or afraid of you.  I think you understand this now.”

Extracts from the Being Well episode mentioned above:

“Ruminating …….could be focused on thoughts, it could be going back over and over again to rehashing a conversation, or revisiting some traumatic memory or period in your time, or worrying about the same thing over and over with a combination of thoughts, and feelings, and sensations. So the word comes from the ruminants [cows, sheep, goats, giraffes] who chew their cud productively to somehow extract nutrition from grass, separating out the cellulose from the nutrients…”

This human capacity [dogs and gorillas probably don’t ruminate] is the result of our neurological development as a species:

“… developments, neurologically, arguably, in the last couple 3 million years has been twofold, number one, our profoundly social brain, and our capacities for relationships of various kinds, and also our capacities to ruminate, in effect, our capacities to do what’s called mental time travel, to go into the future or the past, and be kind of lost in internal mini movies. That second capacity has lots of advantages, it enables us to learn from our past and to make plans for our future….”

“…. one of the things that the brain is trying to do when it’s ruminating is it’s trying to problem-solve ….  it’s a coping strategy, and as we go through life, we have to figure out what to do about different kinds of situations, and this problem-solving is occurring in the background of the brain, all the time, it’s one of its most important capabilities, but when we’re faced with a situation …. [in which] the how of solving it isn’t obvious to us, or it might not exist at all, and the brain can become really fixated on it, like replaying it over, over, analyzing every aspect of it…”

Rumination might also be a defense against certain experiences:

“Rumination is about, you could say, non-experienced experience, stuff that’s pushed down, warded off, disowned, kept at bay, and a lot of the journey is about softening, including, landing, tolerating, and learning……..  the rumination process is a defense against certain experiences…… very often, that’s the way to avoid experiencing something……”

Finally, Rick and Forrest Hanson also mention the importance of balancing closeness and distance when engaging with difficult material, and the importance of agency and acting out in the world. They provide several personal and other common examples like: songs that get stuck in our mimd for weeks, closet fears and childhood fears of a monster lurking under the bed, fear of our partner dying next to us while sleeping, religion related obsessive thoughts, which is interesting to explore, imges and other material arisng during psychedelic experiences, a relentless inner critic, e.t.c.

. They explore how feeling the hypothetical outcome of a dreaded experience or completing the gestalt or how exaggerating the obsession and “surrendering to the worst” can free us from fears or obsessive thinking:

Rick Hanson says: “…. when you dramatize it, and you even deliberately exaggerate it, and intensify it….. [For instance] you imagine that there is a part of you, because often these particular obsessions relate to parts [of ourselves]……  so then if you own that part of you, you’re bringing it into the ambit of your own influence, and so you could pretend to be that part which is like a creature, or a scientific but nasty critic, or something, or an evil Disney movie character, creepy, creepy kind of creature, Gollum, ….. and it goes back to this kind of saying, maxim from the Human Potential days, that one of the fastest ways to get off a position is to fully get on it, because then you kind of help the gestalt to complete….”

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Book related memories….    continued….   

From Brené Brown’s book Daring Greatly:

“Worrying about scarcity is our culture’s version of post-traumatic stress. It happens when we’ve been through too much, and rather than coming together to heal (which requires vulnerability) we’re angry and scared and at each other’s throats.”

“We live in a world where most people still subscribe to the belief that shame is a good tool for keeping people in line. Not only is this wrong, but it’s dangerous. Shame is highly correlated with addiction, violence, aggression, depression, eating disorders, and bullying.”

“Because cynicism, criticism, cruelty, and cool are even better than armor – they can be fashioned into weapons that not only keep vulnerability at a distance but also can inflict injury on people who are being vulnerable and making us uncomfortable.…. Someone else’s daring provides an uncomfortable mirror that reflects back our own fears about showing up. creating, and letting ourselves be seen.”

The fields around where I live and the roads and paths where I go for a walk are for the time being flanked by wild flowers, so I’ve had the chance to pick daisies during my walks.

In today’s post I have included material that I did not include in the previous one because I had thought it best to keep it short.

In the part on Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate’s book I had intended to also refer to Brené Brown’s chapter with the title Wholehearted Parenting [6], in her book Daring Greatly, because it has some relevance to the topics of their book. The quotes above are from her book. Also, I had intended to further support their arguments with a short extract from  Gabor Mate’s book, Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It, which I am currently reading, and hopefully, will write about in the future. The extract is related to the topic of interdependence of causal factors and how understanding issues or events requires our considering a whole range of interacting factors:

“We have seen that the individual’s brain circuits are decisively influenced by the emotional states of the parents, in the context of the multigenerational family history. Families also live in a social and economic context determined by forces beyond their control. If what happens in families affects society, to a far greater extent society shapes the nature of families, its smallest functioning units. The human brain is a product of society and culture just as it is a product of nature.”

I had also selected some more poetry by Sarah Ruhl. Below are an extract from a poem about racism and whiteness, and a poem about fear of mold and other things….

“I don’t want to fear / the life cycle anymore: / death, mold, endings.

It is absurd to fear the / blue mold on a tomato.”

And

“In places my skin is so white it’s blue.

Crayola retired the crayon called Flesh in 1962,

The same year Martin Luther King Jr. was

Arrested for leading prayer vigil.

Now that crayon is called peach and

Crayola offers apricot, black, burnt sienna, mahogany, sepia.

My skin is whiter than sepia, whiter than apricot.

The white crayon in Crayola doesn’t work on white paper.

It’s like spitting into water.

So most white kids when they draw their  /  own faces don’t color in the skin…..

White kids pretend our skin is the shade of   /  paper and leave the outline alone….”

And an extract by Margaret Renkl from her book, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss (p. 218), on how she understands and has experienced grief and loss in life, and the grief that follows the death of loved ones, in particular:

“This talk of making peace with it. Of feeling it and then finding a way through.  Of closure. It’s all nonsense. Here is what no one told me about grief: you inhabit it like a skin. Everywhere you go, you wear grief under your clothes. Everything you see, you see through it, like a film.

It is not a hidden hair shirt of suffering. It is only you, the thing you are, the cells that cling to each other in your shape, the muscles that are doing your work in the world. And like your other skin, your other eyes, your other muscles, it too will change in time. It will change so slowly you won’t even see it happening. No matter how you scrutinize it, no matter how you poke at it with a worried finger, you will not see it changing. Time claims you: your belly softens, your hair grays, the skin on the top of your hand goes loose as a grandmother’s, and the skin of your grief, too, will loosen, soften, forgive your sharp edges, drape your hard bones.

You are waking into a new shape. You are waking into an old self. What I mean is, time offers your old self a new shape. What I mean is, you are the old, ungrieving you, and you are also the new, ruined you. You are both, and you will always be both. There is nothing to fear. There is nothing at all to fear. Walk out into the springtime, and look: the birds welcome you with a chorus. The flowers turn their faces to your face. The last of last year’s leaves, still damp in the shadows, smell ripe and faintly of fall.”

Finally, I wanted to share a couple of links, one to an audio recording of the story of Jonathan Livingston Seagull https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8COt1n3jDqA, and one to Brené Brown’s Unlocking Us With Brené Brown podcast Be True To Yourself at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPo_r0zlcPg

In this episode she talks about trust in friendships throughout our lifespan and other relationships. She comments: “Trust is build in the smallest of moments” & “Trust is a sliding door moment”.

So, to come back to Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach, I first read it when I was 21. In this 1982 Greek translated edition that I own the publisher describes it as “a revolutionary fairy tale” and claims that “some readers believed that the psyche of the free is found in Jonathan Livingston Seagull”. This edition includes some beautiful photographs of seagulls mostly in flight by Russell Munson. I had forgotten most of the story apart from the fact that it was about our inherent right to be free to be ourselves and to follow our dreams. The memory of the book would sometimes surface in my mind when flocks of seagulls flew over my house or when on certain occasions some have touched the ground probably looking for food.

It was quite interesting to listen to the story again, four decades later, at this stage of my life. This time round the story felt to a certain degree like an allegory for the life of Jesus. It also seemed to have elements of New Age spirituality. In any case, the story is about a seagull’s unbounded passion for flight and unquenchable thirst for achieving perfection in what he loves most.  Jonathan is different to other birds in his flock because “for most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating.” Jonathan believes that freedom is the very nature of one’s being, that whatever stands against that freedom must be set aside.

One salient message is that we should not let others tell us what we can and cannot do, even if sometimes following our passions can take us away from places and people that we hold dear. Jonathan’s lack of conforming to the norms does not go down well with the other seagulls and eventually, his unwillingness to conform results in his expulsion from his flock. As an outcast but free bird nonetheless, he continues to learn about flying, coming closer and closer to his goal of achieving perfection.  After certain adventures and encounters with other gulls Jonathan feels the urge to return to earth to share what he has learned and to spread his knowledge. He soon finds himself around other outcast but passionate seagulls…

Three quotes from the book:

“Why is it,” Jonathan puzzled, “that the hardest thing in the world is to convince a bird that he is free, and that he can prove it for himself if he’d spend a little time practicing? Why should that be so hard?”

“Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull’s life is so short, and with those gone from his thought, he lived a long fine life indeed.”

“We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill.”